Saved recording disappears

[karmaheiler]

God's morrow,
I have Audacity 1.2.6 using on Vista 32.
To date I have had no problems.
Yesterday, however, I tried to save a recording as an .aup file but, although the file was created, it only contained 83 kb.
Also created was a folder for the data which, although it showed file size as 125MB was actually empty.

In order to avoid losing the recording, I saved it again as an mp3 file which audacity appeared to do normally.

This morning I tried to open this MP3 file to re-work it but, although it shoed a file size of 27MB, there is no sound at all.

Further mysterious occurrences are that, although I make no changes to the files when closing audacity, when I restart, the .aup file size has changed from 125MB to 7.71MB.

Please explain.

Blessed be

Karma Singh

[kozikowski]

Namaste,

Catastrophic causes of file corruption are filling up your hard drive or viruses, or, in rare instances, actual machine damage or hard drive corruption. Does Vista still have Drive Error Check and Defragment?

My Computer > C: > Properties > Tools

Is your virus protection up to date?

Most people have problems when they don't understand that Projects are made of multiple files and folders, but that's not what you have.

I'm thinking about what else could...........

You can get Sudden Machine Insanity if you use magical characters in your file names. Upper and lower case letters, numbers, underscore, and dash are the only legal characters in a filename. I need to shuffle files between all three computer platforms at work, so I don't use spaces, either. You need to write dates in 20090606 form or something like that. Most computers will not tolerate a slash [/] character.

Is that any help?

Koz

[karmaheiler]

Hi Koz,
thanks but none of those apply.

I have masses of HD space, the latest in security software with automatic updates and etc.. etc., etc.

I haven't tried audacity since but next week I can have a go and see what happens.

Cheers

Karma

[steve]

Firstly, upgrade to Audacity 1.3.7 (much more stable on Vista).

Then, open Audacity (1.3.7) and go to "Edit menu > Preferences > Import/Export". There are 2 options marked "safer" - select both of these options.


(You need to "Export" the audio from Audacity before you can play it in a media player or burn to CD. The recommended export format if you are making a CD is "16 bit Microsoft PCM WAV"